Honor reddened up to the very roots of her hair. She was an inveterate _blusher_. A word, a look, nay even a passing thought flitting across her own pure mind, would send the red blood coursing under her delicate skin. This peculiarity, which formed one of her greatest charms, was a source of constant annoyance and mortification to the young wife. It was so tiresome to betray what otherwise no one would know anything about but herself; so provoking, that John might be guessing now that she was harbouring a wish that was not altogether flattering to his self-love. She was longing, though she would not have told him so for worlds, to go away from Ryde. The strangest feeling of depression--a depression for which she could not in the least degree account--was creeping over her spirits. To analyse her sensations would have been for this young girl simply an impossibility. That the aspect of life and the things of life had, in some inscrutable manner, changed for her, she was, after a vague fashion, aware. There was a shade over her future. An extinguisher seemed, by some invisible hand, to have been placed over the bright point in the horizon, where hope had before shone with such undimmed lustre. Honor was far too untaught in the mysteries of our complex human nature to understand, in even a limited degree, why the sunshine of her life--in spite of John’s love, her matronly dignity, and her new clothes--seemed suddenly to have faded out. How was this young girl, this almost child, to surmise that the number of newly-made wives who go through the like ordeal is legion? Sooner or later, in a greater or in a less degree, the same flagging of the spirits, the same utterly-unexpected and hard-to-be-endured _tædium vitæ_, oppresses the young spirit which had soared, alas, too high, and had dropped to earth so quickly. Time and “habit” may, or may not, according to the idiosyncrasy of the sufferer, produce beneficial results; but who can deny that the condition is a critical one? Who will not be found willing to agree that this probable condition of mind should form matter for serious reflection before the irrevocable words are spoken which bind one woman to one man so long as their lives shall last? There is an easy-to-be-believed-in “flatness,” a flatness very depressing to the female mind, when _the_ one great event--the epoch to which all the daughters of Eve naturally look forward--is past and over, and the wife has _quietly_ to learn whether or not she is “dearer than the bride.” Anticipation--highly raised, and coloured by the wondrous charm inalienable from the unknown--is at an end for ever; and fruition, in nine cases out of ten, makes poor amends for the loss of hope’s gay pleasures, and the absence of the joy which anticipation brings.